Slow Gods

In a far-future galaxy, an ancient machine intelligence known as the Slow, a perfect black sphere, sends messengers warning that the binary star system Lhonoja will collapse in a supernova in one hundred years, obliterating all life within an eighty-three-light-year radius. The narrator, Mawukana na-Vdnaze, tells the story of everything that follows.

Maw grows up on Tu-mdo within the United Social Venture (USV), a society governed by an economic hierarchy called the Shine. Under the Shine, individuals are born into debt and valued solely by their labor. Maw's parents run a restaurant in Glastya Row, a lower-class borough of Heom. Quiet and awkward, he eventually directs cargo flights at a traffic tower. When the Slow's warning arrives, the authorities suppress the message. Protests erupt, fueled by debt and broken promises. When Special Operations, a Shine military force, bombs Heom, Maw is convicted of subversion for living in Glastya Row and fitted with a debtor's collar.

Before being shipped off-world, Maw encounters Theodosius Rhode, Chief Operations Officer of Antekeda Venture, a Shine corporate entity. Theodosius asks what could have prevented the rebellion; Maw answers: hope. When Maw cannot say whether he loved anyone in the city, Theodosius walks away, concluding Maw is unloved and therefore insignificant. Maw later learns his mother died in the bombings and his father vanished.

Maw is sent to Hasha-to, a brutal refinery moon. After breaking his leg, he is strapped into a Pilot's chair on a cargo ship. Faster-than-light arcspace travel requires an organic mind to navigate an interstitial space called the dark. The Shine uses forced prisoner labor as Pilots, irradiating their brains; most go mad before they die. The equipment meant to lobotomize Maw malfunctions, so they drug him instead. The ship reappears two hundred light years off course with all crew dead, yet Maw is alive and unmarked.

One hundred years later, Lhonoja has gone supernova. Maw lives on a small island on the planet Xihana. His companion is Rencki, a quan (a machine intelligence that chooses its own physical form), who has taken the shape of a three-tailed fox with concealed weapons. Maw's emotional life has low "granularity": He feels pleasure and pain but cannot name specific emotions. When overwhelmed, he becomes "dysregulated," losing physical coherence in ways dangerous to those around him. Major Phrawon, a Xi military officer assigned to watch over him, recruits Maw to Pilot the Pride of Emni, a living Xi biohauler, on support missions to Adjumir, the planet nearest Lhonoja.

Unlike the Shine, Adjumir embraced the Slow's warning, evacuating roughly three billion people through a lottery system over a century while eight hundred million remain, their numbers never called. Maw meets Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra, a scholar preserving Adjumiri artefacts for future generations. Te (the Adjumiri pronoun) shows Maw the rituals that structure Adjumiri life: chimes of silver for the evacuated, wood for those who have taken Grace, a ceremonial poison for those choosing death before the planet burns. Gebre and Maw begin a physical relationship, though te insists it remain casual, believing love costs too much for someone born knowing when they will die. Their connection deepens, but Gebre refuses to leave, unable to abandon ter people. The Major ends Maw's missions, likely because others fear his growing attachment, and he does not return for ten years.

Seven years after the supernova, a quan named Hulder, believed to serve the Slow, claims Gebre has requested Maw to retrieve something vital from Adjumir. Maw flies back with Rencki, arriving twenty-six days before the Edge, the light-speed shock wave. Desperate numberless, people whose lottery numbers were never called, ambush them and demand Maw's ship. When the power fails, Maw becomes dysregulated and kills them. At the institute where Gebre works, te reveals te never sent for him; Hulder lied. Te shows Maw a Tryphon-class blackship interface, a device the Shine uses to communicate with its planet-killing warship fleet through arcspace.

Shine Corporate Security (Corpsec) soldiers attack the institute, killing most inhabitants. Gebre loads the interface into a vehicle and sends Maw ahead, then is captured. Over the comms, Gebre tells Maw that what he carries matters more than any life: "No life is special and all of them are." Maw reaches the Emni and enters arcspace. Roughly three weeks later, Adjumir burns. Eight hundred million people die unseen.

Aboard a Xi military ship, Maw interfaces with the Tryphon, hearing broken Pilot minds chained to blackship chairs across the Shine. He spends years trying to extract locations but fails, and the Shine replaces the system with the Titan. Later, Cuxil, ambassador for the Consensus (a collective of voluntarily bonded human minds), recruits Maw for diplomatic missions. At the Spindle, a neutral orbital habitat, Maw delivers the Tryphon to Ulannad, a covert operative for the Unionists, an anti-Shine resistance movement.

Theodosius, now Executor of the Executorium (the Shine's supreme governing body), arrives at the Spindle with a warship. When Maw discovers a deal to return the Tryphon to the Shine, he confronts the conspirators. Theodosius crushes the interface and has Ulannad executed without any traceable order. In a private meeting, Theodosius pushes his finger into Maw's destabilizing flesh, fascinated by his nature. Someone shoots Maw from behind; the shot passes through his insubstantial body and wounds Theodosius, who uses the scars as propaganda to declare war against Nitashi, launching an invasion planned months in advance.

The Accord, an interstellar alliance opposing the Shine, condemns the invasion but is paralyzed by blackships targeting its worlds. The Edge reaches Cha-mdo, a Shine planet of 1.2 billion the Executorium made no effort to evacuate; its people die from radiation over weeks. Maw joins the Nitashi resistance, running arms through the Shine blockade. After a betrayal, Corpsec massacres most of the crew. Maw and one survivor escape in a crippled ship, suffocating in deep space until Rencki, now a combat frigate stationed at the Slow's direction, rescues them.

Inside the Slow, Maw learns the full scope of a century-long plan. The Slow presents a hypothesis: Since all values are arbitrary and all things end, "you should live with love." But love on this scale demands sacrifice. The Slow manipulated events, sending the Tryphon to Gebre, using Maw as bait, and permitting deaths on Cha-mdo and Nitashi to radicalize opposition, all to create conditions for the Shine's fall with minimal casualties. Riv Fexri, a scientist Maw met at the Spindle in Theodosius's entourage, has been a Consensus agent since childhood and built a vulnerability into the Titan system, giving the quans access to every blackship's location.

Aboard a hidden Accord battleship, Maw connects to the blackship network one final time. Accord forces destroy all but three blackships. Maw stays with the dying Pilots, whispering Adjumiri words of comfort. The Accord declares war and dismantles the Shine's military. Over two years the Shine collapses. The Accord builds magnetic shields to protect former Shine worlds. Theodosius disappears.

Maw returns to his island. He visits Adjapar's cryofacilities, where Adjumiris sleep above the terraforming planet, and tours the archives holding Gebre's preserved artefacts. He shares kol, a traditional Adjumiri drink, with Agran, a young Spindler of Adjumiri descent, and gives her a grammar of a dying Adjumiri dialect. At home, he finds a strange boat on his shore. Theodosius answers the cottage door, aged and failing, expecting Maw to kill him. Maw feels nothing: no curiosity, no rage. He tells Theodosius he will probably turn him in come morning. In a final passage, Maw flies the aging Emni to Lhonoja's remnants, pours kol in the dead space, sings songs of Adjumir, and asks the dark, "Where next?"